Need a quick review of last week’s lecture from your advanced health assessment class? Just get out your iPod. Sound far fetched? It’s not. Some schools, including Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, TX, have started using iPods and podcasts to teach nursing students.

Graduate students in some of the classes taught by Anne-Marie Williamson, MSN, FNPC, are experiencing a whole new world of learning thanks to a one-year pilot educational program. When the year is up this summer, Williamson will compile a report on how the technology worked. “I haven’t evaluated that the learning actually occurs in an objective sort of way,” she says. “But I can’t help but feel that if they are excited and engaged, there is some learning going on.”

The seed for the idea was planted in 2005 when Williamson became a full-time professor. A self-proclaimed Apple person, she was tinkering with her computer when she got a notion to create some podcasts and upload them to a Web site so students could download them to their computers. “The students really liked them,” she says. “They thought it was really cool.”

Williamson kept the idea bouncing around in her head and about a year ago, got an email about grant money that was available at the college. She wrote a proposal, laying out a plan where the school would purchase iPods for students to use. It was accepted, and soon after, she got the money and a great deal of support from the college. The university provided Williamson, who records everything herself, with an Apple laptop and IT folks helped her set everything-a camera, a microphone, several monitors-up in her office. All she had to do was get the students on board.

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